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HELP! Tivo dead after backup??!!

I was helping a friend backup his 30hr Tivo and after doing the diskcopy for 4 1/2 hours neither the original A drive of the backup drive will work. When we first started the process we had a problem with linux seeing the second drive properly. When we checked the Bios it showed the settings mentioned in the FAQ about locked drives. We downloaded the WD file and ran as instructed. Rebooted using Dylans disk as instructed and everything looked OK. Tivo A drive was set as master and backup as slave. Did the backup command using dd conv=noerror if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdd bs=1024k. After 4 1/2 hours it reported no errors and Blocks in matched Blocks out. Set backup drive to primary and turned on Tivo and it hung at the "just a few more seconds" screen. Same thing happens with the original drive.
Before doing the disk to disk copy we checked jumper settings at least 5 times to be sure not to make a mistake. Anyone have any ideas? I'm at a loss as to why the original drive no longer works.

Thanks

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Mike

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Registered: Jan 2000
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Try another IDE cable in the TiVo. Can't hurt.

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I'm the friend that Mike is helping out. I switched the TiVo's IDE cable with a known good cable...same problem. Also, just for clarification, the TiVo hangs at the "Your recorder is starting up. Please wait a moment..." screen.

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Registered: Jul 2000
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double check the jumpers on the drive thats been installed in the tivo to make sure its set to 'master'. then check it again. if you're sure its set to master, then check it a 3rd time.

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Got TiVo?

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Registered: Apr 2000
Location: Cambridge, MA
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I know it sounds crazy, but I made this mistake:

Check to be sure the power cable is plugged back into the drive. I forgot to do this and almost had a heart attack.

On the jumpers, more than once I had them in the wrong place because I was reading the jumper chart upside down.

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Another question: Did you back up to a quantum or to something else. If it's not a quantum, I believe you have to set RUNIDETURBO to false (covered in the FAQ).

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The drive is powered up -- when I plug in the TiVo, I can hear it spin up and then hear a couple seconds of disk access. I've checked and rechecked the jumper settings (I've tried all the combinations) and I've let it sit on the opening screen for more than an hour just to see what would happen.

By the way, this is all on the original A drive. I wouldn't mind so much if the copy doesn't work (which it doesn't), but this is the original drive we're talking about. And, yes, I know we copied the original primary to the new Quantum secondary because of the backup time (4 1/2 hours) and the amount of data (28629+1 blocks in & out or something like that...I don't have the exact block count in front of me but it was the same in & out). If we had copied in the wrong direction, the "backup" would have been pretty quick. :-) Any other tips?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Steve66:
If we had copied in the wrong direction, the "backup" would have been pretty quick. :-) Any other tips?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Steve66:
And, yes, I know we copied the original primary to the new Quantum secondary because of the backup time (4 1/2 hours) and the amount of data (28629+1 blocks in & out or something like that...I don't have the exact block count in front of me but it was the same in & out). If we had copied in the wrong direction, the "backup" would have been pretty quick. :-) Any other tips?

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You're right...my mistake. I'll check out the drives tonight using Dylan's boot disk.

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OK...I checked it out and here are the results. I hooked up the original A drive as the secondary master on my PC; there are no other drives on the PC.

First problem: It's only recognized as 9MB by my PC's BIOS; I ran the "dlgchk" utility to unlock the drive and rebooted with Dylan's boot disk. It's now recognized as a 30GB drive.

Second problem: During the boot off Dylan's disk, the partition check comes back with the following...
Partition check:
hdc:Signature 0, be16 Signature 0
16:00: block 0 has signature 0 rather than 1492
unknown partition table

Third problem: I get the following error when I try to mount the partition using "mount /dev/hdc4 /mnt"...
/dev/hdc4: Success
FAT bread failed
FAT bread failed
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

So...is the data on my drive toast? BTW, I also tried the Quantum 30GB that I tried to backed up to and it reports the same problem, although the BIOS has no problem recognizing it as a 30GB drive...I don't need to use the dlgchk on the backup drive.

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For some reason, the mount command tries to mount your partitions as dos partitions. Try again and specify the filesystem type:
mount -t ext2 /dev/hdc4 /mnt

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quote:

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Originally posted by sjf:
Definitely NOT true. There are the same number of sectors on each drive. It will take the same time, and have the same number of blocks whether coping the 'original' drive over the blank backup, or the blank backup over the original drive. The only difference between the two is that when done the proper way, you end up with two drives with the Tivo image on it. Done backwards, you end up with two blank drives. (NOT a good thing, by the way!)

[This message has been edited by sjf (edited 11-20-2000).]

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Assuming all you did was to unlock the original A drive, I wouldn't think that it would have killed the drive contents. I suppose your main task now is to determine if there is anything at all on the original drive. If not, you will need another source (another TiVo drive) to restore from.

I'm not a Linux guy, but you might try placing ONLY the (new, good, jumpered as master) A drive on the system and verifying which drive it is seen as before adding the slave and copying. In fact, since you now (supposedly) have TWO blank drives, try putting something (dos, windows, anything will do) on the drive, then copying THAT to the new blank drive. Then make sure BOTH drives contain the data. That way if both drives end up blank AGAIN, you haven't lost a second TiVo drive. Hope this is clear.


[This message has been edited by sjf (edited 11-21-2000).]

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quote:

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Originally posted by sjf:
Assuming all you did was to unlock the original A drive, I wouldn't think that it would have killed the drive contents. I suppose your main task now is to determine if there is anything at all on the original drive. If not, you will need another source (another TiVo drive) to restore from.

I'm not a Linux guy, but you might try placing ONLY the (new, good, jumpered as master) A drive on the system and verifying which drive it is seen as before adding the slave and copying. In fact, since you now (supposedly) have TWO blank drives, try putting something (dos, windows, anything will do) on the drive, then copying THAT to the new blank drive. Then make sure BOTH drives contain the data. That way if both drives end up blank AGAIN, you haven't lost a second TiVo drive. Hope this is clear.


[This message has been edited by sjf (edited 11-21-2000).]

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Just a quick update...I tried the advice given by stamasd above and tried:
mount -t ext2 /dev/hdc4 /mnt

I did this and got back the following:

EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc4 or too many mounted file systems (aren't you trying to mount an extended partition, instead of some logical partition inside?)

I tried this on both the original drive and the copy and got the same thing. Mike...let me know how your backup goes this weekend!

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Could you try again with /dev/hdc7 instead of /dev/hdc4? Same command otherwise. Both partitions 4 and 7 should be Linux-mountable. Same goes for partition 9, usually /var (/dev/hdc9 in your case). But it doesn't look good, it seems at least partition 4 was damaged, either before the backup or during it. The message about an extended partition doesn't mean a thing here.

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I'm having this exact same problem, and I haven't tampered with my drive at all! I'm trying to change my password! It's a 14hr Quantum. Any other suggestions?

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quote:

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When we first started the process we had a problem with linux seeing the second drive properly.
[...]
dd conv=noerror if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdd bs=1024k

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Is it possible that only the first several sectors are corrupted and the rest is good? If it's just the partition table, perhaps it could be reconstructed?

Isn't there a pdisk syntax that could help here? "pdisk -l /dev/hdc", IIRC.

One other thing to do would be to write several sectors to a file then use a file viewer, see if it's mostly "blank" or "deadbeef".

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